noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646
DURHAM — Twenty-three years after the first World AIDS Day was held, an estimated 33 million people worldwide have HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.
More than 25 million people since 1981 have died from the virus, making it one of the most destructive pandemics in history.
It’s a pandemic that strikes home. According to the executive summary of a research report released this week by the Durham-based Southern HIV/AIDS Initiative, the Southeastern United States is experiencing the highest rate of new HIV/AIDS infections in the nation.
“With the highest rates of both new HIV diagnoses and HIV-related deaths in the country, as well as poor social determinants of health and high poverty rates, the South faces an urgent need for resources to fight the epidemic now,” said Carolyn McAllaster, a Duke University law professor and director of the Duke AIDS Legal Project and the initiative.
And Durham’s HIV rate remains around 40 cases per 100,000 residents, a rate that’s one of the highest in the state, and well above that of the rest of North Carolina.
But as we mark World AIDS Day again today, a broadly effective HIV vaccine is starting to appear finally within reach.
“There is a renewed sense of optimism indeed that a protective vaccine can be made,” said Barton Haynes, director of the Center for HIV/AIDS Immunology and the Duke University Human Vaccine Institute.
“There is now considerable momentum in the field building on a number of breakthroughs and the pathway is becoming clearer on how this can be done.”
Duke Medicine researchers are helping bring that reality closer.
They have just received three grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for HIV projects in the Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery program. The total amount of all three grants is about $37.2 million.
Much of the work the Duke researchers are doing is based on a clinical trial in Thailand of a vaccine that showed only modest success.
“It provided a small degree of efficacy, not high enough to deploy” the vaccine, Haynes said. “But it provided hope for the field that a vaccine could be made and we are working to see why that vaccine might have worked.”
A five-year, $24.6 million award from the Gates Foundation will allow the Duke team of David Montefiori, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development, to continue work on facilitating “the discovery and timely licensure of a safe, effective and practical HIV vaccine for the world,” Montefiori said.
The lab is monitoring antibody responses in preclinical and clinical phases of vaccine testing and generating new findings “that will help bridge the gap between preclinical vaccine discovery and human clinical trials,” he said.
Haynes received an $11.7 million grant, over three years, to study the best way to create effective immunogens that would ultimately help neutralize the virus at the time of transmission.
A third grant, for $892,000 over three years, went to Michael Frank, a professor of pediatrics and immunology, whose work involves the study of proteins that play a role in defense against the virus.
It remains difficult, Haynes acknowledged, to estimate when a broadly effective vaccine would be available. But, he added, “we now have some new signposts to help us get where we want to go. We know which questions to ask. Now we have a pathway.”
